This lecture critically examines the US approach to solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It highlights the consistency between the Bush and Obama Administration’s handling of the peace process. The fight against Islamists, the rhetoric on democracy promotion and the call for the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel represent the essential goals of Bush’s policy in the post-September 11th era. These same goals have also shaped the Obama Administration’s perspective on the Middle East. Assessing opportunities and challenges facing the Obama Administration, following the start of the Arab Spring era, reveals a persistent US credibility predicament that may have already hindered Obama’s ability to effectively manage the pro-democracy revolutions in the Arab world and the pursuit of a just and lasting peace in the region.

This talk will consider conversations and experiences with former militia fighters from Lebanon's war between 1975-1990, to argue that fighters do not lose any part of their humanity when they kill and participate in armed warfare. I suggest, rather, that the discourse of humanity and the resort to the notion of dehumanization is a rhetorical device with hegemonic influence in debates and conversations about war and peace. My aim is to provide a critical anthropological approach to peace studies and our understanding of war and its violence.

Global civil society has been referred to as the “second superpower.” How is it that civil society groups have been able to challenge the dominance of the world’s military and financial powers? How have they intervened in the global arena to affect global politics? Jackie Smith, a scholar of transnational social movements, and professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh will report on the history of civil society groups’ engagement in the United Nations and how this has shaped the kind of political activism we’re seeing today in the Arab Spring and in the U.S. Occupy Wall Street movement. This workshop is being offered for three (3) ACT 48 continuing education credits.

A light dinner and parking will be provided. In order to receive parking, teachers must register before Friday, February 10, 2012. Registration will remain open after that date, but validated parking will no longer be offered

In recent years, some of the most urgent and highly charged public and political debates in the Anglophone Caribbean have centered on sexual citizenship. The acute homophobia of the dancehall has dominated national and international attention and crafted a region of intolerance and hate crimes. This talk opens up the terms on which Caribbean subjects can participate in global debates about sexuality by shifting discussions away from contesting homophobia towards contesting heteronormativity.

In a region that is hallmarked by such cultural and ethnic heterogeneity as the Caribbean and by the undoing of binary conceptions of identity, the understanding of sexuality as heteronormative or homo(deviant) stands out as a conceptual anomaly. To shape a different understanding of love, sex, and desire of Caribbean subjects, Donnell argues that while the Caribbean may be, as Time Magazine famously put it, the most homophobic place on earth, it is also always already a queer place. Conceptualizing the Caribbean Queer and reading its multiple forms allows a more transformative discourse of sexuality to emerge-alongside, but also beyond, that which contests homophobia.

Alison Donnell is a Reader in the Department of English Literature at the University of Reading, UK. She has published widely on Caribbean and black British writings, including Twentieth Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History (Routledge, 2006) and a major new Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature (Routledge, 20011) co-edited with Michael Bucknor. She is currently completing a monograph called “Caribbean Queer.” She is a Founding Editor of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies and serves on the editorial boards of Journal of West Indian Literature and MaComere.

Angelique V. Nixon is a Bahamian writer, cultural critic, teacher, community worker, and poet. She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of English & Creative Writing at Susquehanna University. She teaches and writes about Caribbean and postcolonial studies, African diaspora literatures, feminist and postcolonial theories, and gender and sexuality studies. She serves on the board of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at City University of New York and co-chairs the board of the International Resource Network, Caribbean Region, which connects activists, researchers, and artists who work on diverse genders and sexualities.

George Reid Andrews, author of the well-known Afro-Latin America, introduces the experience of Latin Americans of African descent - their links to each other and to Africa.

How the rise and fall of Amazon rubber barons linked to the rise of plantations in Southeast Asia; how pop star Shakira's belly dancing reflects the history of the Lebanese trade diaspora in Latin America; and more.

ACHIEVING SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IN AFRICA
The African Studies Program, in collaboration with the Schools of Education, Public Health and the Ford Institute for Human Security at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA) will be hosting an international conference on “Achieving Sustainable Development in Africa.” This conference has been organized with collaboration from partners from African institutions namely: the Forum for African Women’s Educationalists (FAWE); the University of Ghana, School of Public Health (SPH); and the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. The aim is to bring together partners with a major focus on sustainable development in research, policy and practice from universities, research centers and community based organizations to share their mutual experiences and research regarding the constraints and opportunities for sustainable development in the areas of:
Health and Environmental Sustainability
Educational sustainability
Gender equity
Governance, Conflict Mitigation and Development
Each of the four identified areas will be discussed by a panel of invited presenters from both the U.S. and visiting partners from Africa—academics, policy makers and practitioners. Papers will be prepared in advance during the year before the conference, with close collaboration between individuals from partnering institutions (Pitt, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and Uganda). Key people in all the institutions will facilitate discussions as we examine critical components of sustainable development and advocate for the necessary resources and policy changes required to improve existing approaches to make them more sustainable. They will assess past strategies and why they have failed to address the deep economic, social and institutional changes needed for sustainable development and propose a way forward to achieving better outcomes

Sociology Colloquium, "The Hidden Qualifiers of Globalization," presented by Dr. Leslie Sklair, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics.

This concluding workshop looks at North America's connections with the world through the experience of Pittsburgh. A visit to the Heinz History Center exhibit, "Pittsburgh: A Tradition of Innovation," will show North America as a source and recipient of world-wide influences.